Fu Xi

Fu Xi a legendary ancient Chinese ruler and culture hero, honoured by tradition as the first of the Three Sovereigns and credited with teaching humanity the arts of hunting, fishing and divination. He is especially associated with the invention of the eight trigrams and the beginnings of the classic of changes, and he stands at the head of the traditional sequence of sage rulers of China.

The Legendary Sovereign

Fu Xi belongs to the age before recorded history, the mythical dawn of Chinese civilisation. Tradition holds that he reigned for a great span of years after emerging from the wilderness, and that his mother conceived him after a miraculous encounter. He is described as having the body of a serpent and the head of a man, or in some versions markings upon his back that contained the secrets of the natural order.

Together with his sister and consort Nüwa, the goddess who repaired the sky, he is depicted as a bringer of order to a world still raw and unformed. He is said to have established marriage and social customs, to have given people the laws of kinship, and to have set the patterns by which the early human community lived. In the classical accounts he is the first ruler to be concerned with the welfare of all people rather than of a single tribe.

Later tradition grouped him with Shen Nong and Huang Di as the Three Sovereigns, the sage kings of the age before dynastic rule. These figures were understood not simply as kings but as civilisers, each contributing a decisive art or institution to the growing fabric of culture. Fu Xi's place in this triad is the founding of observation, symbol and rule.

The Eight Trigrams and the Classic of Changes

Fu Xi is most celebrated for the observation of the patterns of the sky and the earth and for drawing the eight trigrams, the bagua, each a set of three broken or unbroken lines. These eight symbols, through the combinations of yin and yang, were held to represent the fundamental forces and phases of nature, such as heaven, earth, thunder, wind, water, fire, mountain and lake.

From this insight, according to tradition, there arose the classic of changes, the Yijing, one of the oldest and most influential books in Chinese culture. The hexagrams of the Yijing, formed by pairing the trigrams, became a system of signs used for divination and, in the hands of later philosophers, a profound manual of cosmology. King Wen of Zhou is said to have arranged the hexagrams, and his son the Duke of Zhou supplied the judgements.

The story of Fu Xi's observation gave Chinese thought a founding image: that wisdom begins with attentive looking at the world and with the reduction of its variety to a small set of patterns. The doctrine of change, of the ceaseless alternation of yin and yang and the cyclical return of conditions, became a hallmark of Chinese philosophy and science.

Culture Hero and Inventor

A host of inventions is ascribed to Fu Xi. He is said to have taught people to make nets and traps and to fish and hunt, raising them from gathering to a more secure way of life. He is credited with the domestication of animals and the beginnings of herding. He taught the weaving of cords and the tying of knots, an early art of record-keeping long remembered as the ancestor of writing.

Other traditions name him as the author of music and of the musical pitch pipes, and as the originator of the calendar and of the measurement of time. He is said to have established the eight festivals and the customs of sacrifice. These attributions follow a familiar pattern in Chinese legend, in which the great sage rulers are remembered as the founders of the useful arts.

Because so many arts converge upon him, Fu Xi serves as a symbol of cultural invention itself. In later ages rulers and scholars invoked his name whenever they wished to claim that a practice was ancient and therefore legitimate, and his image came to embody the belief that good governance rests on the mastery of nature's regularities.

Worship, Iconography and Cult

Fu Xi was worshipped as a patron of divination, of learning and of the calendar. Temples to him existed in various parts of China, and his cult was especially prominent in periods when the Yijing and its commentaries were studied closely. He was honoured by scholars and by diviners alike as the first to read the patterns of the natural world and to reduce them to written signs.

In art he is typically shown alongside Nüwa, the two entwined by their serpent tails or holding the compass and the square, the instruments of order and measurement. He holds the compass and she the square, or the pair hold a set of trigrams between them. These images, found on ancient tomb reliefs and painted on silk, express the union of heaven and earth and the establishment of the standards by which a world is measured.

The pair of Fu Xi and Nüwa also carries a mythic account of the survival of humanity after a great flood, in which the two alone were preserved and became the ancestors of all people. This theme of a primeval catastrophe and renewal links Chinese tradition with flood narratives found in many cultures and deepens the sense of Fu Xi as a founder of the human order after disaster.

Influence and Legacy

The image of Fu Xi shaped Chinese self-understanding for more than two thousand years. Confucian writers held him up as a model of the sage who governs by understanding the order of nature, and Daoist thinkers found in the Yijing a metaphysics of change rooted in his trigrams. His name appears at the head of the traditional genealogies of rulers that structured Chinese historical memory.

The Yijing attributed to him became one of the most widely studied books in the world. Its binary imagery of broken and unbroken lines fascinated later mathematicians and philosophers, including Leibniz, who saw in it a parallel to the binary system of numbers. The trigrams also entered the arts of feng shui, medicine and martial practice, and its symbols remain recognisable across East Asia.

Fu Xi stands, finally, for a distinctive ideal: that the founder of culture is not a conqueror but a seer, one who teaches by observing the world and by giving people the symbols with which to think about it. In legend he is the first sage, and the arts of civilisation are traced to his patient attention to the patterns of heaven and earth.

See also

• Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors
• Yijing
• Nüwa
• Yin and yang